Category Archives: Kanban

It’s risky to have it all rest on one person. It could also be unfair. It could halt the delivery of value and of learning. Instead of ironing out behavioural issues that may arise from the person focused role could we consider another view.

Here’s the view from Kanban Training that I got from David Anderson.

Here the Product Owner has helped create a set of policies for selection of work. Here it is noted as Risk Management policies. This would include items like cost of delay also balanced against dependencies outside of the team. It could include risks within the team as well. For example, should we schedule work when someone is out on holiday. Maybe you’d bring that forward or realize ways to increase staff liquidity.

It’s observed that when this is done, meetings to replenish a ‘Ready To Start’ column are much quicker and less prone to argument.

Would these policies also mitigate against a PO bottleneck. It might be something worth trying in your context. It may just end up producing more value for you or rather for your customer.

Most managers, and some ‘Agile’ coaches, I encounter shudder when the subject of quality comes up. They think quality hampers delivery. In some ways they are right, you do want to achieve balance, avoiding polishing too much because it can cause being late in delivery (in mission critical projects it may be better to over polish if the cost of failure is high).

Some managers may shudder because, ooops I may have been found out and I’ve been pushing my teams to push out code which is not really ready.

Other managers, maybe the inexperienced ones but not always, have no idea what quality is. They tend to believe the lies their development teams’ say when they say it’s ‘unit tested.’

As a manager, quality is one of if not your biggest concern. Addressing quality is an economic concern as well and managers are responsible for economic outcomes. Bad quality will slow down your team. But not just that, it will also slow down your organisation.

How does this occur? How does it slow down your organisation? Well I’ve seen this time and time again when I come to a new client. Work is at a stand still and when I dig a bit deeper I see the same issue appear.

Yes, teams are overwhelmed with work. So limiting WiP will help. Using workflow mapping and lean techniques will identify bottlenecks. Yes address those. Importantly, in the bottlenecks I find that the reason for those delays is the negative feedback of poor quality.

I see upstream, product ideas waiting to be developed and tested with the customer because there is a wave of poor quality slowing down the delivery pipe. Overwhelmed with defects teams struggle to pull new work into development. When they do eventually pull that work in, it is developed with such poor quality or worse the facade of quality (e.g. formal QA) that it further feeds into the negative feedback loop.

That loop gets even slower to run such that it turns into ‘3 month Stabilization’ phases or an entire quarter whereby the organisation freezes any new releases into production to avoid an outage.

These sort of mitigating steps often occur after some sort of disaster has occurred which has its root cause in poor quality. One big example is releasing a new version of software such that it shuts down an assembly line at a factory and affects thousands of customers who are prevented from using their mobile devices. The cost there was millions of dollars.

So asking for quality is easier said than done. Or does it have to be that hard. Usually workers are over-burdened. So limit WiP as was mentioned earlier. But then ask for quality. Now that they are not over burdened they can put their efforts into producing quality output.

Give teams the space to improve and they usually will. Sometimes as a coach I can give them some training and they will do it all by themselves (this interview demonstrates this) to a point, and sometimes being involved with them is needed from the outset or when levelling out or stalling out occurs.

In my experience, results can happen very quickly. For an organisation I was recently involved with it took three months to go from a cycle time per feature of 40 days to 3 days. This involved addressing quality and bringing in aligning practices from extreme programming and specification by example. Reducing WiP and batch size also assisted. This happened in stages, guided by data from a Cumulative Flow Diagram that mapped the stages of delivery and guided improvement efforts. The first stage got it down to 9 days (by applying WiP limits, Policies on size and changing the Test Strategy) and then, the next stage, amplifying the unit testing practices to remove an archaic and slow UI testing bottleneck (sunk cost fallacy associated with that) really accelerated the flow of work.

AgWorld, the published case study, did it in 6 months. They did chose to do for themselves which is fine. They can achieve a lot more with a coach who can bring the practices quicker and help avoid stagnation which does tend to happen as well.

Find a slow process, you more often than not find poor quality. Address quality and just observe how things get better for everyone.

Can someone answer this question? Well yes, I can help. In short it’s what you do, be that individually but mostly in a team, to ensure anyone you serve receives the service you provide in a reasonable time frame with appropriate quality.

Where does that start?

It starts with understanding who your customer is. Taking steps to learn about the customer and what satisfies them. There are some tools available to you to help like Customer Surveys, Customer Interviews, Customer Empathy Maps, Personas and going to see for yourself.

Somewhat lagging but still providing information about the customer and their needs ( which can and are probably changing) is a Net Fitness Score which is an alternative to Net Promoter Score. If you are producing software you can add code to capture data about how your customers are using the application. This is is part of a process called instrumentation that is done to computer programs.

This takes us into the area of measurement. In addition to customer measures, a team can also use other metrics to ensure delivery is just right. By just right, we mean that any feelings of over-burdening (muri) are minimised to ensure that a team can sustainably deliver work.

Here some measures include, service response times (cycle time) for the different types of requests a team gets. Are we able to deliver those reliably. By reliable we mean within the realms of probability and not exact measures. Knowledge Work being naturally variable in nature we tend to defer to probabilities like a Service Level Agreement. 85% of the time we can deliver in 3 days as an example.

In aiming for better on-time delivery you may need to eliminate muda or wasteful activities. You may find amplifying collaborative activities and learning new skills will help. These type of improvements stem from understanding the nature of different requests like demand (high and low periods), expectations of quality and when request are expected to be fulfilled (Cost of Delay).

Another measure is acceptable defect levels, with the aim to reduce these to a negligible level. Defects may need to be balanced with responsiveness. If you require greater responsiveness then Fit for Purpose may mean acceptance of higher failure load (another name for total defects). Responsiveness may also mean less predictability and some work may have an have a wider range of delivery date performance.

If failure load is high, then addressing some level of quality can also have a bearing on on-time delivery. In software development that means ensuring little or no technical debt. High levels of technical debt lengthen cycle times as a team looks to deal with the complexity of software laden with technical debt. Continually reducing and maintaining low levels of technical debt will help maintain reliable delivery. It will also allow innovation to occur because the team is freed from the burden of low quality.

Addressing these and becoming reliable means you will have confidence to communicate service level expectations within reasonable levels of probability. Doing this with appropriate quality will often result in plaudits to the team and reversing what may be many sources of dis-satisfaction for the customer and team a like. Find out what makes your system of work Fit for Purpose. Work hard on reaching that level. Agility will be a natural result.

I’m an Australian working in the USA coaching highly distributed teams. We speak English but even then there are slight differences, like Australian English and American English and even within America like from South to North.

We find it’s hard to get people to use video cameras. They are cheap however the culture tends to not encourage use of them. It’s always hard to collaborate at the best of times and distribution would be a good excuse not to do that.

Seems most distributed companies can’t get past just the phone and a little screen sharing. When we use just these, we can’t see each other’s facial expressions and body language. It’s hard to know how to react to feelings and we have to assume or turn up our intonation sense when listening (perhaps even speakers and listeners can make more us of their voice to relay feelings). Another big issue is having attention – where I work inattention is called ‘multi-tasking’ and we know that don’t work.

Overall, this is more a problem around the difficulties in collaborating and the fears around that. We’ll need to work on that to allow the tools to be useful. Make it safe. Create the culture and camaraderie of teamwork and reward that. Highlight even when people are doing things that harm teamwork via a team working agreement. Realization can quickly occur after that and a team can self correct.

Then there is technology, my friend Agile Bill Krebs – @AgileBill4d, is teaching and coaching on tools to assist the distributed work place. There are simple tools like join.me which is down the low end of the spectrum through to immersive environments like Minecraft.

The technology is there – it just needs a willingness to try using it and adapting to use it to it’s utmost advantage.

Your last resort is to abandon the distributed model. That can be avoided I suggest.

Here’s a comparison of David Marquet’s Ladder of Leadership which derives from his work as a nuclear submarine captain and writing his book Turn the Ship Around and then subsequent workshops and writings and the Kanban Method.

The Kanban Method says start where you are. Other frameworks require a more explicit transformation to new roles and ceremonies. The Kanban Method also says Improve Collaboratively and Evolve Experimentally (using models and the scientific method). Of it’s 9 values it also states Leadership. Acts of Leadership from every level.

A model that you can use to improve and create leadership from everyone is called the Ladder of Leadership (although not explicitly steeped in the scientific method, it is a model). It starts where you are. Everyone, and this doesn’t matter what position one holds, is looking to be told what to do. This is where mostly everyone is.

The Ladder of Leadership recognizes this. Everyone can use the model as a frame to help each move up the ladder to become more intentional. By recognizing where someone is on the ladder whilst in conversation, a colleague can frame a question using the next rung on the opposite side of the ladder.

Measurement of success comes via a proxy from other measurements like faster cycle times, better quality (less failure demand) and people should be happier and if they aren’t something is still awry.

It takes some time to achieve this. One must be prepared to stay the course despite the bumps in the road. If it doesn’t work on one occasion, reflect upon that. Realize we are humans, have a laugh and try again using what you’ve learnt. The ultimate aim is to create leaders not followers. Leaders can relieve bottlenecks and fix problems quicker and with more knowledge than someone further away from the problem.

Here’s a tip for scrum teams. You are almost certainly using a task board. If not start today.

That task board typically consists of the standard TODO, Doing, Done style. Sometimes you will see the Doing column divided up even further – some mature teams realise that but a lot don’t so here comes the tip.

Typical Simple Board

In doing sprint planning or planning for a User Story the team identifies a number of tasks required to complete the story. For example, perform detailed analysis, code the UI, code the business logic, perform testing.

It turns out to be quite a laundry list of tasks. Within that list is always a pattern. That’s right always. All your user stories almost certainly involve a component of analysis, coding and testing.

So the tip is to make that visible and stark to everyone viewing your board. Evolve from the three column format of ToDo, Doing and Done and divide that Doing column into Analysis, Code and Test.

Go for this. Workflow is visible

Whilst your at it, define some common policies for those columns. For instance for coding – code and test UI, code and Test Business Logic layer and so on so forth. That’s called your Definition of Done.

What does this do for the execution of the sprint? Here are several things it can and should do.

Sprint Planning becomes more focused on asking real pertinent questions about what’s coming up rather than diversion on getting the laundry list together. You could really ask the what if questions of the Product Owner and making a deeper start in technical implementation details and discerning the risky parts of the work.

Make the flow of work more visible. This will increase the effectiveness of daily standup. Speaking to the cards on the board and seeing where they are at, how long they have been in a part of the workflow causes more transparent and focused discussion of the work. Of course the team should be willing to discuss the reality of the situation and some will refuse to do that even when it’s staring them in the face. Note: This is when the real rubber hits the road – the Scrum Master, Agile Project Manager will be willing to seek out help the team discover the causes and deal with the organisation impediments.

Show the real time for each part of development. This can help the team improve on specific problem areas. Because there is real data for each point of the process, the team can choose where to focus their improvement efforts to decrease the overall time to deliver.

So you may ask. Is this Kanban. The simple answer is no. A Kanban System has more components – most importantly WIP limits on workflow steps. However use of a these ideas more readily found in Kanban systems will still create visibility. Evolution to more flow based systems could be an end result or perhaps just a hybrid like Scrumban.

So avoid the workflow masquerade. Make those tasks into workflow and get on with real work.